“Sticks and Stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me…” Untrue children’s rhyme

Epithets and insults have been memorable these past two years. From the US presidential campaign to the post-election rallies to the UN General Assembly speeches. Almost all of them dished out by Donald Trump:– Look at That Face (Trump mocking Carly Fiorina)!– Little Rubio (Trumo mocking Marco, who famously confided to the media that Trump has a small, er, hand)!– Lying Ted (Trump describing Sentor Ted Cruz)!– Low Energy (Trump about Jeb Bush? Ben Carson)!– Crooked Hillary (Trump for Clinton)!– Rocket Man (Trump about Kim Jong Un)!

Now the Iranians have picked up the term “rogue”, a favorite epithet used by US politicians against other nations. Trump and Rouhani traded “rogue” name-calling at the UN General Assembly this week.

But the top prize, the Oscar, the Nobel of epithets goes to an alleged North Korean Twitter source: “Impotent threats by international shouting magnate Donald Trump are dismissed, as the twitchings of a Dog licking its flea-riddled scrotum.”

Sometimes, reading and listening to the media and to people, many people both here and abroad, it seems like Dark Forces have taken over America. People talk wistfully of the era of Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Yes, the era of George W Bush is also missed now as part of a Golden Age, and that is an accurate assessment given what has come after Barack Obama. Who would have thunk it way back in 2008?

That is because the Dark Forces have now completed their takeover of America, at least for now. In this dangerous bleak Year of Our, Your, and Their Lord of 2017. Only the federal courts and the media stand between them and wrecking the system so carefully crafted by the Founding Fathers of the United States. The legislature, those who are to consent and advise, have gone spineless. A combination of malevolent lawmakers in the Congress, tunnel-visioned corporate types running the executive branch, and an ignorant uninterested president are leading America to some kind of brink. (Did I leave out single-issue-focused voters?) Widening domestic class warfare and likely more permanent wars abroad, mainly new wars in the Middle East. Even as they claim to be trying to make America great again.

In that spirit, it is appropriate to listen to an old but good song that expresses the spirit of these dark times. It is sung by Mary Hopkins, and is titled Those Were the Days…….

A Martian who has just arrived in the United States (either a legal or an illegal alien) would think American politics are divided into two major parties:

The Party of Russia. We are told across much of the media to believe that the Republican Party (GOP) is the Party of Putin and Russia (with all the unpleasant accoutrements: Gulag, KGB, other extremely un-American behavior like guzzling Vodka and eating Pirozhky). Suddenly the Democrats, big losers of this election year, have developed a strange zeal for fending off a Russian quasi-Bolshevik takeover of the USA.

The Party of China (Chi-Com, PLA, Robber Oligarchs, Generals snapping up US real estate, industrial espionage, job-stealers, unfair Trade Surplus, Cyber Espionage, North Korea, etc). That would be the Democrat Party, and not only by default.

To complicate matters, many people in the Middle East, and in the wider Islamic world have a different view on this. They also have their own notion about US politics. Many, nay actually most people in the region, believe that both major American political parties are the Party of Israel. Or, more precisely, the Party of Likud right-wingers.Cheers

Everybody has been following the debates, arguments, and food fights between Donald Trump and “others”. From his Republican rivals to the Pope to the Bush family to the Clintons and former Mexican leaders/oligarchs. He certainly does not back down from a fight, he usually doubles down. In the process, he calls his detractors and rivals some choice words (some of them well-deserved).Tsk, tsk: politics were supposed to be served discreetly, like a slow Borgia poison, not so bluntly as a broadsword or Roman gladius.

Can you imagine Senator Mitch McConnell, majority leader, saying of a President Trump what he has been saying of President Obama for seven years? Trump would almost certainly call him what he exactly thinks of him: a pussy from Kentucky at best.

Can you imagine Israel’s Benyamin Netanyahu coming to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in order to openly sabotage American foreign policy as he did last year? A right-wing foreign leader? A President Trump would openly call for his deportation, adding the “pussy” and “liar” epithets as well.

Can you imagine a President Trump bowing down to some tribal autocratic kleptocratic prince? Or walking around holding his hand as Bush did in Crawford?

Can you imagine him politely, too politely, deferring to a foreign leader, be they Chinese or Russian or Middle Eastern?

This is not to endorse him or overlook the tools of bigotry he has been conveniently using against easy targets like Muslims, refugees, and desperate Latin workers that his own businesses probably hire. Cheap shots he takes, but that has become one tool of American politics these days.

As for the nonsense he utters about Obamacare and the Iran Nuclear Deal, it is just political posturing. The horse has already left the barn on these issues, as all Republican candidates know but pretend not to know.CheersMohammed Haider Ghuloum

It is no secret that most Arab princes and potentates would prefer a Republican administration in Washington. That is based on long-standing oil and other mutual business relations as well as on the warlike statements of Republican politicians toward Iran, Lebanon, and others. Most of them believe a Republican would have attacked Iran years ago, something the Saudis openly urged as the Wikileaks cables exposed, although George W Bush declined to do so. On several Middle East issues, they take the same stand as the Israeli Likud rather than the Obama administration.

Yet Mr. Trump presents them with a dilemma in the aftermath of the recent Wahhabi terrorist attack in San Bernardino. Actually even before that attack. You see, they don’t realize that he is unlikely to win the GOP nomination, and if he did he will not win the presidency. Americans have never elected to the presidency a gambling boss with a big mouth who is openly bigoted. Not in the past hundred fifty years anyway. And they are not about to do so now. So the princes worry about his Muslim-baiting and Nazi-like proposals on how to treat Muslims in the United States.

The potentates have not heard of my tweeted Fatwa that by March or April Mr. Trump will be back in the trash-bin of history or on reality TV (both, since he needs the money). They actually believe he has a chance of winning, and therefore they can’t afford to antagonize him. Hence their official silence from Riyadh to Doha and Abu Dhabi toward his outrageous, politically-motivated, public uttering against their faith.

Of course no U.S. president would do what Trump is proposing, nor would he in the prohibitively unlikely event that he is elected. But going public with such proposals eggs on many people into more violent Islamophobia, especially many Republican voters of the historic know-nothing inclination. In other words the Trump bullhorn makes those so inclined ever more hateful.CheersMohammed Haider Ghuloum

“But at the end of the day, Iran is a scientifically-advanced country with good cash-flow and, if it is willing to pay the price, it can develop a nuclear weapon. Absent some program of national-scale lobotomization, there is nothing the international community can do about this. The negotiators have implicitly admitted this by focusing on limiting Iran’s breakout time to one year rather than on denying the capability altogether. But nobody can explain why one year is a magical period of time, versus, say, six months or five years. This is because there is no reason………… But it is more a symbol of the fight over Iran policy than the core of the issue. At heart, this is a fight over what to do about Iran’s challenge to U.S. leadership in the Middle East and the threat that Iranian geopolitical ambitions pose to U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia…………”

“In 2006, when the Times published a piece revealing that the government, in the name of fighting terrorism, had collected the private financial information of Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism, Cotton, then an Army lieutenant stationed in Baghdad, sent a letter to the newspaper, saying that the editors should be put “behind bars.” ………… In 2012, he was elected to the House, where one of his first acts was to call for an amendment to a sanctions bill that would impose penalties not only on those who broke the law but also on their relatives, including their “great-grandkids,” “to the third degree of sanguinity.” The amendment failed—as the Washington Post pointed out, it was blatantly unconstitutional—but Cotton didn’t have much time for regret, because he had already decided to run for the Senate against Mark Pryor, the two-term Democratic incumbent, with the backing of the Tea Party Express…………..”

He said: “impose penalties not only on those who broke the law but also on their relatives, including their “great-grandkids,” “to the third degree of sanguinity.” But then he was a brash young man at the time. A brash middle-aged but powerful man can be even more dangerous.

The various American wars in the Middle East and in Muslim lands have created a whole cottage industry of people and institutions that profit from warmongering and guilt by association. And the prospects are promising for more. Never been more promising.

They have had their eyes set on an Iran war, Mother of all Middle East wars. Even the Bush (43) chickenhawks would not take the plunge: shows you how far the Republicans (and a few Democrats) have gone. Imagine how long it could last and how much it would cost and how high some defense company shares can go. And how higher that would raise the barrier along the Jordan River, even higher, one of the goals that are not articulated.

Oh, and about “the letter” to Iran meant to scuttle the nuclear negotiations and possibly provoke a new Middle East war. Juan Cole reports that Tom Cotton received over $700, 000 for his senate campaign from the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel, another group of well-funded and frustrated but hopeful chickenhawks. Principles, even those of warmongering, don’t come cheap. But then most Republicans and many Democrats in Washington already know that.

It is a new American Jihadist movement. Just like the terrorist Caliphate of ISIS, it seeks to dominate here and to impose its will and that of its donors ‘over there’. Through continued political war here, and continued military campaigns ‘over there’. That requires a lot of money.

They say Yemen is threatened with division again. They say there are now two capitals in that blighted country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Sanaa in the North, and Aden in the South. They say that former president Hadi (bin Zombie) is claiming he is back in power from Aden, that he and his local southern allies and the GCC countries run whatever they can run from Aden. That the Houthis and their allies now rule from Sanaa. Two capitals and two rival claimants to power, each claiming the other is not legitimate (they are probably both right). While the AQAP-hunting drones rule the skies. That is Yemen for now.

Now we have two regimes and two foreign policies in the United States as well. Both rule from the same city, geographically speaking. One is Likudnik, largely Republican, but also bi-partisan to some extent, and it takes its signals from Tel Aviv (okay, West Jerusalem) via AIPAC and Las Vegas and other campaign money centers. It follows the cult of Netanyahu, a demagogue that reminds me of a softer gentler version of (dare I say it?) another ruthless demagogue (or two, my alibi). The other regime is Democrat and also claims Washington. They diverge in many ways, but now especially in foreign policy. Each is pinning its hopes on 2016 to sweep into absolute power. Neither looks set to realize that hope, not in that year.

Let’s see which of the three cities can stop being dysfunctional, can manage to become functioning, first………

“Republican senators warned Iran on Monday that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remains in office, in an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making. The letter, signed by 46 U.S. senators, says Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements and points out that Obama will leave office in January 2017, while many in Congress will remain in Washington long after that. “We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,” …………..”

This is unheard of. In no world power, even a third rate power, would the legislature try to sabotage the foreign policy of the executive branch. Nowhere else, not so openly. Except in the United States, which now has a Senate/Congress that would do justice to a banana republic. They have done it twice within this month, and it is early in March. First by secretly inviting a foreign leader, Netanyahu, to come to Washington and attack the American foreign policy and try to sabotage it. Now they are addressing, warning, Iranians directly that any deal with the president will expire in 2017.

Except that is not the point. They are assuming that Washington can have its way, even with a political class running amok, pushing the world toward another unnecessary war. The fools will drive the other P5 away. Germany, France, Britain (maybe), Russia, and China are not beholden to the powerful Israeli lobby. Their politicians are not dependent on, nay owned by, right-wing special interest money in the USA or in Israel. Mostly they do represent the people who vote for them.